This blog would be amiss if it did not make at least a passing reference to the Microsoft Facebook investment. What does this mean from an enterprise perspective? Quite simply that Facebook can get into the intranet market. Pictured above is Bill Gates's Friends page on Facebook. |
We rarely talk about Facebook as a potential intranet application. Sure there are some really large company groups on Facebook but those are typically used for alumni networks. Few if any are actively used to communicate and collaborate within an organization.
Well, this investment represents an opportunity both for Microsoft and Facebook. Now that white collar workers are starting to use Facebook more and more, their personal and professional lives can blur here too. And in fact, why shouldn't they? Web users are gravitating to fewer interfaces and more familiar web experiences in any case.
How can Microsoft capitalize on this trend? Simply by building mini intranet type applications for the Facebook environment. Facebook in turn needs to provide a secure document repository solution. As soon as it does that, it will have the two most important elements of an intranet - a corporate directory and a place to store documents.
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